“Fire it up Baby” was a great success!
Last Saturday we had our first cooking class in Chelan on CA’s porch, “Fire it up, Baby!” an outdoor BBQ class. The focus was to keep it simple, do it all outdoors with some fire, a slab of hard-rock maple, a knife and the hands our mamas gave us!
We started by grilling up lots of fresh vegetables with a Mediterranean emphasis and made a warm chopped salad out of them all “loved up” with fresh lemon, olive oil, salt and pepper.
To accompany the veggies, we made a rustic lentil hummus, flavored with hand-chopped pesto, loaded with fire toasted pine nuts, garlic, fresh garden basil and of course more olive oil. If you have love hummus but have never tried it with lentils, you gotta go there! Lentils cook up in about 20 minutes compared to two hours for garbanzos. Lentils are not only fast, but they fill your kitchen with a wonderful peppery aroma as they cook. They taste wonderful and are incredibly nutritious! Oh, and you can get local lentils because they grow right here in Washington state! The fun part about the pesto and the hummus for me though is the rustic nature of the preparation…we don’t need no stinking food processor! All hand mashed and chopped. Simple, rustic and seriously delicious!
To wrap it all up in we made some garlic naan. You ever had garlic naan? Ever made it? Its super easy and damned amazing smeared with pesto-scented lentil hummus and the grilled veggie salad!
Well, not only did we make tasty food, but we shared it with eleven “culinary students” on CA’s front porch while sipping Ventimiglia Cellars hard cider and wines. One person also brought a growler of her husband’s sweet stout home brew! We had a great time and no one went away hungry or thirsty!
Oh yah…so we started talking about BBQ pizza during the class and so, bonus…we made some of that too! Garlic naan crust, BBQ veggie salad, fresh pesto, cheddar, pepper jack, fresh grated Romano, a few slabs of ripe tomato and a twist or two of sea salt and black pepper. Wahoo!
I hope this peaks your interest! We plan on more classes very soon…stay tuned!
Keep it fresh, hot and tasty!
CheffyK